AMD appoints new chief graphics architect

Ever since Eric Demmers left for Qualcomm, AMD had a serious gap in its graphics architectural leadership that had to fill with either internal promotions or new blood.

It looks like John Gustafson got the job and this senior architect at Intel labs got the job of a key graphics product architect. At Intel he lead the eXtreme Technologies Lab, conducting cutting-edge research on energy-efficient computing and memory, as well as optical, energy and storage technologies. You’ll notice that he didn’t do graphics there.

Gustafson comes from Massively Parallel Technologies, a startup created back in 2007 and before this he worked at SUN computers. His field of expertise seems to be a parallel computing rather than gaming, which might sound somewhat alerting to many AMD graphics fans, but let’s hope that Gustafson and the rest of graphics team will continue to bring some good graphics.

The official job description states „In this role, Gustafson will set the technical vision for the AMD graphics business unit, driving the technology roadmap and platform for the AMD Radeon and AMD FirePro product lines as well as new technology planning and execution of business objectives.“

AMD certainly changed a lot of things internally and last time we talked to the company, the goal was still to fight Nvidia in graphics field at least for the time being, and there were not any radical changes about it.Gustafson will probably try to make AMD better in the parallel computer world, with potentially increasing market share in this high margin business.